


room 416

by thekardemomme



Category: SKAM (France)
Genre: Cancer, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Fluff and Angst, Heavy Angst, M/M, References to Depression, Sickfic, True Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2020-05-12 22:30:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19238383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thekardemomme/pseuds/thekardemomme
Summary: in retrospect, he figures it was all just preparing him for this. for practically living on a pull-out couch in room 416 of the inpatient oncology unit, holding lucas’s hand. he’s watched, over the last seven months and twelve days, as lucas deteriorated. as he lost weight, lost hair, lost appetite. lost himself, and then found himself again. and it was hard for the both of them—but eliott wasn’t going to go anywhere. he was prepared.





	room 416

**Author's Note:**

> some lovely anon informed me that there were no mcd fics in the elu tag. naturally, i had to fill the void. disclaimer: i know nothing about medical stuff/cancer so i tried to be as vague as possible. sorry if something is incorrect. 
> 
> i can’t look at the stars  
> they make me wonder where you are  
> stars, up on heaven’s boulevard  
> and if i know you at all  
> i know you’ve gone too far  
> so i, i can’t look at the stars

ever since he was little, eliott has hated hospitals. his paternal grandfather developed brain cancer when he was young, so his family often spent their free time with him in his hospital room. it was a little traumatizing, watching someone that eliott loved so dearly just waste away like that. grow thin and frail, more and more fragile by the day, and fade into nothing. it fucked eliott up, in a lot of ways.

and then, as he got older, _he_ spent a lot of time in and out of hospitals. emergency rooms and psych wards. he’d thought that his bipolar diagnosis would cut his visits down to maybe one a year, but it didn’t work out that way. it took way too long to get his medications balanced properly and he always got destructive when he was manic, and self-destructive when depressed. he never faded away, but he could feel his family staring at him like they thought he might. eliott hated that part, too.

in retrospect, he figures it was all just preparing him for this. for practically living on a pull-out couch in room 416 of the inpatient oncology unit, holding lucas’s hand. he’s watched, over the last seven months and twelve days, as lucas deteriorated. as he lost weight, lost hair, lost appetite. lost himself, and then found himself again. and it was hard for the both of them—but eliott wasn’t going to go anywhere. he was prepared.

today’s been a good day. lucas feels good, at least relatively, and he’s smiling and laughing and it’s days like this that make eliott feel like he can _breathe._ nowadays it’s like he’s always holding his breath and waiting for the worst.

eliott smooths his hand over the line of lucas’s forehead where his beanie rests, and gently asks if lucas is cold. lucas was always cold before, and it’s so much worse now. eliott keeps meaning to buy him an electric blanket, but it’s hard to come by the money when he’s paying for all of this medical shit, too. or, okay—lucas’s father is paying the medical bills, but eliott pays for a lot of things, too. he doesn’t mind. he can’t think of a better place for his paycheck to go.

“a little,” lucas admits, and eliott asks what he’d like for eliott to do. “you could come cuddle with me?”

eliott smiles and crawls into the small hospital bed with him, wrapping his arms around lucas and being careful not to mess up any of the tubes and wires. lucas feels different in his arms now—sharper and thinner—but he’s still lucas. eliott still feels like he’s at home, when they’re like this.

“did you hear what the doctor told me?” lucas whispers, and eliott nods. he’d been listening. how could he not? this was his boyfriend’s life on the line. “i think we should get married.”

“what?”

lucas shrugs, reaching out to toy with the strings of eliott’s hoodie. his fingertips are blue. “i think we should get married. i want to marry you. we might not get another chance.” he glances up at eliott and there’s tears in his eyes. lucas has always been a crier, but even more so now. he’s always been the strong one for eliott, letting eliott cry on his shoulder, but it’s eliott’s turn now. eliott is always strong, never lets lucas see how much he aches. “what if i never have another good day? what if it’s just bad days from here on? i want to marry you, baby, i don’t want to wait and risk something happening.”

“of course you’ll have more good days, baby. don’t talk like that. you’re going to have plenty of good days. especially once—”

“there’s almost no chance of remission, eliott. you know that. it’s just false hope at this point, so… you need to let that go.”

eliott tightens his grip on lucas, like he’ll disappear if eliott lets go. tears are burning his own eyes, now. “i’m serious, don’t talk like that. you’re the one who told me to take things minute by minute, and we _don’t know_ what’s going to happen in the next minute. they could figure something out, find some medication or treatment that works well for you. you _don’t know,_ lucas. none of us do.”

“that shit only happens in movies, eliott. this is real life. and in reality, i’m going to die.”

“lucas, stop,” eliott whispers, voice heavy and miserable. he turns to press his nose into lucas’s cheek, leaning his forehead against lucas’s temple. tears fall before he can stop them. “i don’t want to hear any of that. you’re not going to die, not any time soon. we’re going to figure something out. there’s always hope.”

“belief is a graveyard.”

eliott pulls away, climbing off of the hospital bed and wrapping his arms around himself. “fuck you, lucas. i know— i know that this is something i have to come to terms with, okay? i heard the doctor. i know what he said. but it’s _hard._ it’s hard to constantly be positive and try to stay strong when i _know…”_ eliott cuts himself off, unable to say the words out loud. he can’t talk about lucas’s death, he just _can’t._ “i can’t even begin to imagine how hard this is for you. every single day, i admire your strength and your courage. i couldn’t do it. but damn it, lucas, this is hard for me, too. i’m suffering too.”

for a moment, lucas just stares at him. just watches as eliott collapses in on himself, as he cries and trembles. and eliott thinks he’s going to apologize, tell eliott to come back to bed so they can cuddle and just take things minute for minute.

but lucas doesn’t.

“this is real life, eliott. i know you’re hurting, but there’s nothing we can do about it. i can’t make it better because i can’t get better. and i’m sorry you have to see me like this, and i’m sorry you have to go through this, but there is _nothing_ we can do. we can’t just pretend everything is fine and ignore the fact that i’m probably going to be dead before christmas. we have to accept the reality, okay? you need to accept the reality. and i’m sorry it’s hard for you, i really am. but this is the life we have to live. it’s shit, but it’s all we’ve got. and i’m sorry if this isn’t what you want to hear, but what we have is better than fucking nothing. i don’t want to fucking die, eliott, but i’ll take it graciously because i got to be with you and i get to spend every day of the rest of my life with you.”

eliott’s knees give out.

“i’m sorry, eliott. i’m sorry. i wish i could change things. but we can’t. and that’s why i want to marry you. i want to be yours, fully yours. forever. and i know— i know that one day, you’re going to find someone else and fall in love and get married and have so many beautiful children. i know you’re going to live a full life with someone else. and i hate it, but fuck. i want that for you. i want you to feel that happiness. and it’s enough for me that we get to spend the rest of _my_ life together, even if we don’t get to spend the rest of _yours_ together. that’s better than nothing.”

“lucas…”

“please marry me, eliott,” lucas pleads. eliott can’t see him, can only barely see his toes from his place on the floor, but he trains his eyes on them anyway. “make me yours.”

so, they get married on a tuesday. it’s two weeks after that good day, but it happens to be another good day. they get married in room 416 and eliott’s parents and lucas’s mom is there, and there isn’t a dry eye in the room by the end. they wear rings bought off of etsy for $45, and eliott swears to lucas a million times that he’ll wear it for the rest of his life, even when he’s married to someone else.

lucas says he doesn’t have to wear it forever, but the bottom line is this: lucas lallemant is the love of eliott’s life. any future wives or husbands will never be lucas, and eliott will never love them the same. and eliott would gladly wear lucas’s ring every single day for the rest of his life, even if it meant never wearing anyone else’s ring again.

their wedding is the last good day for a long time. they have three weeks and four days of increasingly bad days, where lucas is in unbearable pain and can barely keep food down. he sleeps a lot, and when he’s awake, he’s miserable. they don’t talk much, but eliott doesn’t mind. he’s okay with just holding lucas’s hand as they watch television, rubbing his back when he throws up, and whispering stories to him when he’s in pain. it breaks eliott’s heart, but he doesn’t let lucas see that. lucas has enough to deal with.

the next good day comes on christmas eve, and eliott is really smug about it. he decorates room 416 and they talk about what they’re going to do after new years, because the doctors think lucas will be able to go home for a bit on january 2nd if he stays on this path. eliott knows he will. he’s never been more sure of anything in his life.

lucas has some fuzz back on his head, but he still wears beanies. eliott learned to knit specifically to make lucas a handmade beanie for christmas, and it’s sitting in a little red box under the tiny fake tree the nurses had allowed.

lucas, impatient as ever, keeps begging to open presents.

“patience, baby!” eliott grins, stringing up colored lights all over the window and wall. he’d tried to decorate lucas’s bed, but the nurses said they’d get in the way of any tubes and wires they may need. lucas had been disappointed, but eliott was quick to kiss that away. “we’ll get to that. you’re lucky i’m even letting you open presents tonight, because _technically_ you’re not meant to open gifts until christmas morning.”

lucas rolls his eyes. “you and i both know that’s not feasible. it could be a bad day tomorrow, for all we know.”

“i know,” eliott sighs. “the sacrifices i make for you. ooh, i love this song!”

nat king cole crackles over the shitty radio on the table next to lucas’s bed, and they both sing along. lucas doesn’t know (or doesn’t remember) all of the words, so eliott carries it. he doesn’t tease lucas for not knowing the words like he normally would. it’s just not the time.

once the lights are up, eliott grabs the presents and takes his seat at the end of the hospital bed. he lets lucas go first, watching patiently as lucas struggles to tear open the paper. his hands have grown a bit shaky and weak, so eliott jumps in to help a few times. when lucas opens the box and sees the beanie—lime green, with a small embroidered ribbon on the bottom—he breaks out into a huge smile.

“where did you get this?”

“i knitted it,” eliott beams. “my mom did the embroidery on the bottom, though. i wasn’t skilled enough for that and didn’t want to fuck it up.”

lucas tears up, and hugs eliott so tightly that lucas’s body begins to shake with the effort. eliott hugs him back, breathes him in, whispers how much he loves him.

eliott opens his gift next. it’s just an envelope, so eliott is expecting some cheesy hand drawn card, since lucas couldn’t exactly go christmas shopping or anything. what he doesn’t expect is to find four pieces of folded notebook paper, with lucas’s scribbled writing on the front and back of all of them.

he glances up at lucas with tears in his eyes and his heart in his throat, because this is beginning to feel an awful lot like a goodbye. “lucas?”

“you don’t have to read it in front of me,” lucas murmurs, and eliott knows that’s his way of asking eliott not to read it in front of him. “you don’t have to read it at all, really. if you think it’ll just hurt you. but i wrote it when i first got diagnosed. you were stuck in traffic and trying your hardest to get to the hospital, and you called me crying and swearing because you weren’t here to hold my hand while they told me what was going on, and i cried with you and told you it wasn’t your fault and that i loved you. and then i wrote this while i waited for you to get here, and i never really intended on giving it to you, but… i don’t know. i think you need to read it.”

“what the fuck, lucas?”

lucas blinks hard, like he hadn’t been expecting anger. eliott is kind of surprised by his reaction, too, really—but he can’t stop. his hands shake around the letter and he can practically feel his blood boiling, threatening to light a match and make him explode.

eliott continues, “this is so fucked up. you can’t just… you can’t just say goodbye like this. we’re going _home_ soon, don’t you get that? you’re getting better. why can’t you fucking accept that you’re getting better and you’re going to be fine? why are you— why are you so obsessed with the idea that you’re going to die?”

“because i am,” lucas snaps. “i am going to die. i thought we’d talked about this, eliott.”

“yeah, we did. and i cried myself to sleep almost daily, and i thought about it all the time, and i fucking _prayed_ about it. and now we’re here, going up and getting better, and you’re still trying to force me to accept a future that we shouldn’t be worrying about right now. we talked about accepting that you were getting worse, so why the hell can _you_ not accept that you’re getting better?”

“calm down, baby.”

“fuck you. don’t tell me to calm down. i’m so fucking sick and tired of being _calm_ about this. i can’t do it anymore.”

he shoves the letter back into the envelope, putting it in his bag and then slinging his bag over his shoulder. lucas watches as eliott packs up, but he doesn’t say anything. and, in all honesty, that just makes eliott angrier. he doesn’t understand why lucas wants to die so badly. lucas is getting _better,_ they’re going _home,_ why can’t he accept that? why won’t he be happy, have hope?

eliott digs his cigarettes and lighter out of his pocket, holding them in his left hand and then reaching out with his right. he cups lucas’s cheek and presses a kiss to it, and then leans back. lucas is crying again.

“i’m going to go for a smoke,” eliott tells him, and lucas’s bottom lip trembles. “and then i’ll probably go home, take a shower and get some dinner. and then i’ll come back, okay? i won’t be gone long. i’ll bring you back some candy.” lucas doesn’t respond, just wipes his tears angrily and stares at eliott like he’s trying to coerce him into staying. “i need to breathe, lucas,” he murmurs, voice soft and torn apart, and eliott sees the moment those five words splits lucas in two.

“i love you,” lucas whispers.

“i love you, too. always.”

eliott passes lucas’s mom in the hall. she’s carrying two presents, and she smiles when she sees eliott. she tells him she hopes she hasn’t missed the presents, and eliott promises her that she hasn’t, because his parents haven’t arrived yet. when he tells her that he’s going home to take a shower and eat, she gives him this _look,_ half sympathetic and half judgmental. like she can understand why he wants to wash the stench of hospital off of him, but can’t understand why he would leave lucas.

he’s not leaving lucas, just breathing for a moment, he reminds himself, feet squeaking on the wet pavement of the parking lot. eliott didn’t realize it’d rained. he wishes it’d snowed.

their apartment is just as he’d left it the last time he was home—spic and span from disuse. eliott can’t help the excitement he feels to know he’ll soon get to see it lived-in again. as much as room 416 has started to feel like home, it’ll never compare to apartment 21B.

eliott takes off his clothes and throws them in the washing machine, and then makes his way to the shower. he uses lucas’s soap because it smells way better than his own, and washes his hair twice. no matter how much he showers, he feels as though he’ll never truly get the smell of hospital off of him. it lingers.

after the shower and after dressing in a pair of sweats and lucas’s hoodie, he scavenges their kitchen for something to make for dinner. he winds up making spaghetti with penne noodles instead of spaghetti noodles, because it’s all they have.

out of habit, he makes enough for two servings.

he puts the second serving in a tupperware and tucks it in the fridge. he knows it won’t get eaten.

once he’s eaten and the kitchen is back to spotless, eliott takes his clothes out of the laundry and hangs them on the line. by then, his mom texts him that she’s at the hospital and they’re waiting for him to return so they can open gifts. eliott texts back that he’ll be there soon, and then he lays on their couch and stares at the ceiling.

and he thinks.

he thinks about a lot of things. about lucas, about his sickness, about losing lucas, about how he’s going to live ~~when~~ if lucas does die. it’s something they’ve been preparing for ever since the diagnosis, but eliott doesn’t think it really matters. no matter how much he prepares for it, he’ll never truly be ready. lucas is the love of his life, and he doesn’t know how to exist without him. he doesn’t _want to._ and it’s unfair that lucas will get taken off of this earth before he even gets to see his thirties, before he gets to have a real wedding, before having children. it’s unfair that they don’t get to spend the rest of _their_ lives together.

spending the rest of lucas’s life together might be enough for lucas, but it’s not enough for eliott. he wants lucas forever, forever and fucking ever, and none of this is _fair._

before he knows what he’s doing, he’s crying, and then he’s crying himself to sleep right there on their living room couch.

it’s 10:04pm when eliott jolts awake, disoriented and confused. it’s a good few seconds before he registers his phone ringing, undoubtedly what woke him up. he scrambles to find it in the couch cushions, where it must’ve fallen out of his pocket when he fell asleep.

god, he can’t _believe_ he fell asleep.

when he finally does find it, the call has already gone through to voicemail. he unlocks his phone to call back whoever it was, but before he can, an incoming phone call pops up. it’s his mother.

the sinking feeling in his stomach tells eliott what the call is about before he even answers it. _please, god, no. not now._

“hello?”

“baby? eliott, you need to come back to the hospital now, okay?”

_he was supposed to come home._

“is everything okay?” the words taste like molasses on his tongue, moving in slow motion and hard to force out. “what’s going on?”

“it’s lucas,” his mom says, as though she would ever be calling him about anything else. “you just need to get up here.” eliott realizes, then, that she’s crying. “he’s… sweetheart, they don’t think he has much longer.”

eliott hangs up, slides on the first pair of shoes he finds, and runs out the door. he’s dressed like a slob and probably looks fucking insane, but he doesn’t care. he runs to his car and speeds the entire way to the hospital, and nearly goes off on the innocent front desk lady who forces him to get a visitors pass despite the fact that eliott has basically _lived_ at this hospital for months.

he trips going up the stairs ( _twice_ ) and he falls down turning a corner, but he makes it to lucas’s room in one piece. when he enters the room, everyone is crying and lucas is asleep.

“what’s going on?” eliott asks, his voice high pitched and hysterical. he doesn’t even recognize it. “goddamn it, someone tell me what the fuck is happening!”

the doctor starts to explain it, and eliott cries. he cries and he gags a little, but he doesn’t move from laying next to lucas in bed, holding his hand and pressing his nose into lucas’s cheek. his hands are cold.

on lucas’s other side, his mom is sitting next to the bed, holding a rosary over their clasped hands, whispering prayers. eliott wants to cry that that’s not what lucas would want, but he bites his tongue. it’s not the time. _that type of thing is for the living, not the dying._ just like funerals.

eliott squeezes lucas’s left hand, touches his wedding ring. “you can let go, baby,” he whispers, and he chokes out a sob. “i promise i won’t be mad. just let go. i’m here. you’re not alone. it’s okay to let go.” lucas takes a shuddery breath, and though eliott knows he probably just imagined it, he swears he feels lucas squeeze his hand. “i love you, baby. let go. it’s okay. i love you so much.”

the room falls apart when he finally does. but it’s okay. eliott’s been preparing for this for months. he knew it was going to happen. he cries anyway, over the loss of his husband, as anyone would. he cries and he mourns but he knows everything will be okay. lucas promised.

he moves out of room 416 and back into apartment 21B, because lucas’s mom wants to deal with the immediate aftermath and thinks eliott needs to sleep. eliott knows he won’t sleep. instead of trying to, he sits in the apartment and thinks of how it’ll be lived in now, but only by eliott.

eliott thinks he’s going to move out.

his parents spend the night with him, and eliott lets them have the bed. he sleeps on the couch, because he’s too used to the pull-out couch of room 416 now. that, and it feels wrong to sleep in their bed without lucas next to him.

he doesn’t sleep that night. he reads lucas’s letter, over and over, until the words are burned in his mind and he thinks he could recite it from memory if hard pressed to do so.

by morning, he tucks the letter away and vows not to read it again. not for a long time, anyway. there’s no use torturing himself. he’s been preparing for this for months.

“merry christmas,” his mother says, when she wakes up for coffee. eliott laughs, and not the humorless type of laugh one does when they’re sad—no, it’s a huge belly laugh, the type that makes one’s stomach hurt and eyes tear up. eliott’s mom stares at him like he’s crazy. eliott is pretty sure he is.

 _we can’t just pretend everything is fine and ignore the fact that i’m probably going to be dead before christmas. we have to accept the reality, okay? you need to accept the reality,_ lucas had said. eliott had told him he was wrong, that there was hope. but there was never hope. lucas didn’t live to see christmas. eliott had accepted that reality.

“he was supposed to come home,” eliott says, and his mom chokes on her coffee. he smiles up at her. “it’s okay. i’m just saying. he was supposed to come home. january 2nd.”

“oh, eliott…”

“did you know that i wasn’t there for him when he was diagnosed? i had to go to work, and i got stuck in traffic on my way to the hospital. i missed it. and he wrote me this stupid fucking letter while he was waiting on me, and he gave me that letter for christmas. i read it last night.” he looks up at her, sees how she’s trying to conceal her tears behind her coffee. “i want to burn it.”

“what?”

“i want to burn it. the letter. all of it is bullshit about how much he loves me and how grateful he is for me. how i’m always there for him. how in the love of his life. but it’s all bullshit. because i wasn’t there for him. i wasn’t there for him then, and i wasn’t there for him last night. all i did was yell at him, and then i came home and fell asleep and i let him lay there, _dying,_ all fucking alone. all of it is bullshit.”

his mom hugs him, then, and eliott lets himself collapse into the hug. he cries when he thinks about how, now, this is the comfort he’ll have to get. lucas won’t be there for him anymore.

“he’s always going to be here, you know,” his mom says, like she’s reading his mind. “i know that’s what this is about. i know you’re scared of being without him. but you’re not without him, baby. he’ll always be in your heart. he’s not gone, not really. as long as you love him, he’ll be right here.”

eliott sobs, feels himself crumble. “i’ll always love him. i don’t know how i’m ever supposed to love anyone else. he was it for me.”

“you’ll never love anyone like you loved him, my dear. but that’s okay. you will love someone else, and though it won’t be the same, it’ll still be magical. and lucas will be so happy to see you happy.” she pulls back and wipes his tears, cradling his face between her palms. “just don’t spend the rest of your life looking for him in other people, darling. you’ll never find him, because he’s already in your heart.”

“i can’t live without him.”

“you can and you will,” she promises, her voice firm. “you will be okay, eliott. i know it doesn’t feel like it now, and there will be days you’ll feel like you’re drowning in it. and no, you will never fully move on. you’ll just learn to live with the pain, and that’s okay. it’s all okay.”

he hugs her again, one last time. “thank you, mom. that means a lot to me.” he kisses her cheek and then they pull back, and she promises to give him a little bit of space to clear his head before they meet lucas’s mom. it’s a lot to process, losing the love of your life.

eliott goes back to the couch and pulls out the letter, staring at lucas’s handwriting. despite all of the pictures he has, all of the clothes of lucas’s still in the closet, all of the belongings here that were or are lucas’s—this feels the most real. the last piece of lucas’s heart. the last piece of himself that he gave to eliott.

eliott smiles at it, kisses the paper. then he lays down and stares at the ceiling again. a mirror image of the night before. “it’s not fair, lucas,” he whispers. he holds the papers to his chest, blinks back tears, and stares up at the sky. “i was supposed to die first, lucas. it was meant to be me first. you’re such an asshole, you know. always have to one up me. dying first is _such_ a dick move. classic lucas.” he smiles again, and closes his eyes. “but don’t you worry, baby. i’ll just have to die soon so i can come in a close second to you. i know what you’re thinking—eliott demaury, humbly accepting second place?! don’t laugh too much. i’m only accepting it because i have no choice.”

he opens his eyes again. he looks at the letter, and then back up at the ceiling. if he stares long enough, and clears his mind, he can almost hear lucas laughing at him. it makes him smile.

“you won’t be up there alone for long, my love. i won’t let you be alone this time. not again. i promise.”

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr @elullemant
> 
> song lyrics from the beginning notes are from stars by grace potter and the nocturnals


End file.
